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Saturday, May 31, 2014

In The Beginning Was The Money, And The Money Was With God...

I was cleaning out my car when I found a rant that I had written and shared on the air a few weeks back. It has to do with the current state of our union.

Picture from OccupyLincoln.net

Well, here we are. We find ourselves in a country where the highest court of the land has determined that money equals speech and therefore those with the most money have the largest voice. They also have affirmed that a footnote written by a clerk at the top of the lawsuit in 1886 called Santa Clara County vs Union Pacific Railroad changed the definition of corporations to mean that they are living breathing people.

These days we give welfare out to corporations like they are destitute people that actually need the money. Without corporate welfare and bailouts from actual people and tax payers of this great country, the whole free market capitalist model would destroy itself. It tried that in 2008 and in 1932 but the non corporations saved it through our government and taxes.

Now corporations are getting welfare and tax breaks on a regular basis and the courts have recently said that they can use this money to buy politicians and think tanks to write corporate friendly laws. These corporate funded politicians can go to places like ALEC and get bills custom written to be friendly to a wide variety of businesses such as extraction, energy, agriculture, manufacturing and others. They can put their names on them and when they do, the businesses that these bills are friendly to in turn donate money to the politician. This works well for everyone involved except for the citizens of the country that pay the taxes. Companies like Freedom Industries that placed their tanks right on the banks of the Elk River in West Virginia were allowed to site their tanks next to the water supply for the businesses own convenience. The drinking water in the capital of West Virginia was now poisoned but the company is protected from liability. They filed for bankruptcy so the tax payers end up paying for most of the cleanup. This is what happens when corporations get what they want. They destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yes there are still a few rules attached to what would otherwise be called quid pro quo but nothing a high priced lawyer can't navigate around. When the laws do get in the way of doing business, they just get a better politician to pass new laws to repeal any restrictions on their freedoms to do as they please.

This is where we're at. A country that is transitioning from a democratically elected representative government to an oligarchy, elected by those with the most money and speech (same thing now).

Forget Fukushima, Iraq, Afghanistan, Benghazi, or even global climate change. We have lost control of our government and the only way to get it back is with a constitutional amendment to define people as real people. People that eat and have babies. People that fight the wars. people that go to school and have student loans. People that invent things that other people need. People that love and write poetry. People that believe in a higher power and those that don't. People with the freedom to be what ever they can aspire to be.

Not people that reap huge profits but face almost no liabilities. Not the ones that enslave our foreign neighbors to make our products in sweatshops while we toil in a service industry with wages so low, some of us can't afford to live an honest and moral life even though we work full time.

Those people that call themselves corporations don't share in the risks that the rest of us do because they are protected by their lawyers. They internalize profits and externalize their liabilities like BP did with their oil spill. They declared it cleaned up but oil is still washing up onto gulf beaches and will continue to do so for decades to come. Like TEPCO the electric company that has continually lied to the government of Japan and those of the world about radiation spewing from three melted down reactors that will continue for decades. Like the recent recalls by General Motors. GM isn't liable for the deaths they caused because they filed for bankruptcy and that gave them immunity from prosecution in such cases.

Add all this to the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that affirms that millionaires and billionaires can spend as money (speech) as they can afford to influence our elections, you can see that we have lost our country.

Image from Wikipedia

I believe that there is only one course left for the citizens of the US to get back their country and that is to pass an amendment to the US Constitution affirming that only real people are people. This one thing will undo several decisions that allowed the take over of our country by a privileged class of corporate people that worship money over country and real people.

Move to amend.org. Money does not equal speech. There is little time left. If we cannot do this, we will be relegated to prayer and the bible and even that has changed thanks to the US Supreme Court. Now John 1:1 reads "In the beginning was the money, and the money was with God and the money was God."